Hello Wintermute,

thanks a lot, very interesting topic indeed! We really need to know how our users are using our software and get input from that.

Thanks! 🙂

Andrea

I’ve been using Tabbles for a couple weeks now to categorize and cross-reference a good bunch of docs, pdfs, urls, charts, etc, etc on various political and legislative topics. Currently there are just under 500 separate files I’m working with and that number will undoubtedly keep growing.

Enjoying Tabble’s functionality and looking forward to watching it get refined and even more useful.

I’m a PhD student using Tabbles to categorise all my references in preparation for my writing-up stage. The old folder system in Windows Explorer was really hampering my work, since many academic references discuss subjects relevant to different aspects of my research, so it was a nightmare remembering in which folder I had put them and avoiding having duplicates all over the place. Tabbles has sorted this completely now!

In response to one of the posters above, I also use two computers (a desktop in my PhD office and a laptop for when I am out and about). I have devised a system that works perfectly in conjunction with Tabbles. I had always synchronised my desktop and my laptop. I did this using a synchronisation program called SyncBack via a VPN connection to my university’s server. This looked at my two folders, found differences and synchronised the two. The trick, I realised, to make this all work with Tabbles was to ensure that both my desktop files and my laptop files had exactly the same path. This meant creating a new drive partition on my laptop, and giving it the same letter (H:) as my desktop drive. The other "trick" is to change the Tabbles database path (File>Tabbles’ databases>Change database path) to, say, H:TabblesDatabase, so that it is stored with the files you are synchronising, and is therefore kept up-to-date using SyncBack.

I hope this is useful to anyone trying to do something similar. Just a final thanks to Andrea and the team for a great job.

Hi cpc,

thanks a lot for your review of both your use of Tabbles and your configuration. I’d love to put this in our "user stories"… don’t you happen to have a blog or something? If you had a blog and would copy-paste this post there, it would definitely be an awesome testimonial for us!

Thanks again.

A.

No blog, I’m afraid, but feel free to use any of my words as the fancy takes you.

All the best,
Chris

What am I doing with tabbles? Finding it a lot easier to search through my references, for one thing…

Radiology involves two main processes: recognizing a pattern from a set of images, and then coming up with a list of diagnoses that includes the most likely explanations for that pattern. Tabbles can’t do anything about the first, and it doesn’t do the second very well either, but tabbles does let me find out what I need to know quickly so my job is made easier.

The first thing I did with tabbles was to tag a couple hundred of my most frequently used differential diagnosis lists. Each list is for a particular imaging pattern ("basal lung fibrosis", for instance), and might contain anywhere from 3 to 20 possible diagnoses/diseases associated with that pattern. Each list is sorted into a body system (like chest), and then into a subsystem (lung). Each diagnosis that shows up in a list is given a tag. Many of these diagnoses affect a whole bunch of body systems or present in many different ways, so the disease tags can show up in dozens of lists. Then I tagged and sorted all my reference papers with the same system. Some of the papers contain descriptions of a dozen diseases (none of which might be mentioned in the title) and hold obscure info that is really handy to have – if you can find it. As you might imagine, the associations are quite complex and with about 400 files I have thousands of tags and links.

So now I can just type in a disease or finding, and I can easily find my relevant lists, papers, notes, anatomy cheat sheets, procedure guides, web refs etc. I can sort the files by type, year published, relative importance, or even by milligrams of rhubarb if I really wanted to… It’s a lot easier to find obscure facts to test students with (while appearing to be some sort of genius for knowing those facts). Even when I can’t recall where I put it, I can find that needle in my haystack of medical references.

The beauty of tabbles lies in the ease of its file tagging interface, and then helping you find that file later without having to recall specifics. Until I stumbled onto tabbles, I had no way of cross-referencing my files, and as the links multiplied I was beginning to lose track of their various associations. No more duplicated files, lost links, forgotten gems, or ploughing through Google desktop. Tabbles auto-tagging and one-click tagging features makes organizing your data about as simple as it can be. The search engine is both fast and really easy to use. Tabbles lets me concentrate on the important tasks at hand, helps me find what I need quickly, and has made my laptop reference library the object of much envy.

So there you go. Positive review/reference and vague description of filing system/user pattern all in one. Thanks again for the great product.

WOW Ed, that’s a HELL of a review!

I’ll post on our site right now, hoping that people will believe it’s not a fake… it actually involves quite some medical knowledge to write something like that, and I guess none of us here would be capable of that! 😆

But thanks a bunch anyway, and remember that wehenever you have any issue with Tabbles, before starting to worry just drop us a line.
Also please backup your database every once-in-a-while, it’s usually located in DocumentsuserTabblesDatabases (the file is called tabbles.cur_db

Andrea

You are welcome, and deserve good press. The product, and the ideas behind it, are great.

And thanks for the advice – I image my systems regularly, and backup both data and tabbles in different places and formats. So when I ran into troubles with the latest update it was easy to fix 😛
BTW I am looking forward to the new features!